Paul Theroux Loathes Blogs

Travel writer Paul Theroux in an interview at The Atlantic--pushing his new book--remarks:

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn't seem to have any literary merit at all. It's a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.

Ha! That's my blog, although surely there are blogs which do have "literary merit." Still, I'm a bit puzzled as to why blogs as he defines them should provoke such loathing. I rather like babbling and chatty accounts and of course that's what I have in mind for this post.

Daisy's post about the Facebook era still has me thinking round in circles and want to attempt to write more about that.

The picture comes from a National Park Service page, Mississippi River Facts. In case you've missed it big news in the USA is flooding along the Mississippi River. If you look at the right hand side of the map you'll notice the Ohio River. I live about three miles from the Ohio River and about twenty miles from where the Ohio begins at Pittsburgh. The Ohio River is no small river. With the record flooding it's a reminder that the Ohio is just a portion of the great Mississippi River Watershed.

It's wet here. I've got my rubber boots on. The paper today tells us to expect another two months of unusually wet weather. Yikes! In May the grass grows so fast, grass along with everything else. What I can mow now determines what areas I'm able to keep mown the rest of the summer. And there's always a crush because May is also the time for planting. The grass can't be mown when it's too wet, and the rain only makes the grass grow faster. And the ground can't be turned when it's too wet and seeds planted. When I go out to work it starts to rain and by the time it's not raining I'm inside doing something else. I'm not getting much done. Wet weather is part of my personal story right now, but I sure have it better than so many of my fellow Americans, some of them with homes under the water.

Theroux is right that such chatty excursions are outside the boundaries of literature. I'm not sure that blogs are an existential threat to literature, but there's no question media is changing and we are changing along with it.

When I started writing this blog I used a pseudonym. I was also visiting and writing at a social network called Tribe. Tribe was a pretty free-wheeling place at the time, lots of nudity, profanity and the like. Because it was popular with younger folks I was a bit concerned that some of my younger relatives might happen upon my goings on there. But ultimately with all the linking I did at Tribe it became clear to me that because I hadn't organized myself from the beginning for online anonymity the pseudonyms I was using online did little to make anonymous. Web searches clearly associated with my real name brought up links to stuff I put up under screen names, especially at Tribe for some reason.

After using Tribe for a while I discovered the Omidyar Network (ONet), which was sort of an online social network for dogooders. The charitable foundation called the Omidyar Network is alive and well, the social network has been defunct since 2007. The culture at ONet was for people to use their true names. While it's not 100% that's also the norm at Facebook. Anyhow I figured the easiest thing was just to accept that I wasn't anonymous online. There are, however, many good reasons why people publish anonymously online, not the least of which is some people are creepy.

Nowadays I participate at a forum where the convention is for people to participate using screen names. I hesitate to link to that forum because it isn't clear to me what the ripple effects not just to me, but to the users of the forum, might be to linking my pseudonym with my real name. Over at that forum for the last few weeks there's been a long thread on misogyny. The title of the thread seemed pretty generic, but I wondered if using the title links to the forum thread would come up high in search results. Of course they do, and in that search I discovered blog posts, anonymous of course, which were a sort of back channel to the thread.

Certain topics can be quite incendiary and misogyny is one of them. The thread has meandered between talking about misogyny and examples of misogyny, even if providing examples of was not explicitly the intent. Some of the talk was pretty bad but my default reaction was don't feed the trolls because some of the talk seemed pretty good. The problem with that approach was getting called out on the thread for not calling out the BS. I knew that there was some private discussion going on between members, even posting a few private messages myself. What I hadn't known before today was the commenting about the thread and nasty stuff about some of the posters on blogs. Jeez, people can be such dicks!

The xkcd comic pane Duty Calls with the line "Someone is wrong on the Internet" is so often passed around because we human beings seem easily obsessed with being right to the detriment of online comity. Sometimes people anonymously post online because it is unsafe for them to be exposed.

Drima at The Sudanese Thinker probably had danger in the back of his head when he started the blog five years ago. Probably more prosaic reasons along the lines of my not wanting young relatives to stumble upon my Tribe postings seemed more important. Recently Drima exposed his real name at Twitter and at his blog. He didn't offer a long explanation for why he did so, writing:

I have numerous personal reasons for and that I cannot explain adequately in a simple short blog post. Let’s just say the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and the changes sweeping the region now have inspired me and forced me to come to a simple conclusion.

Screw anonymity.

With the events in Tunisia late last fall I began following events at Twitter. Andy Carvin (@acarvin) of PBS was curating tweets, he sort of vetted Tweets. I hadn't been following @SudaneseThinker at Twitter, but had read his blog over time. His tweets came up in Carvin's retweets and I promptly followed him at Twitter. Even though Drima is a pseudonym, I knew enough to have some confidence in him and his tweets. When he retweeted people's tweets, especially in re Egypt, it added to the authority of those tweets.

Dave Kenner at Foreign Policy Magazine recently posted an article Here's your reading list, Mr. President which consists mostly of a list of blogs about the Middle East. The premise of the post is that it's possible to get a realistic picture of political conversations going on in the region. Of course it would be great if the President of the United States sought to hear these views and so as not just to hear the inside Washington policy debate, but the larger point is any of us can be privy to it too.

The impetus for this blog was quite a simple idea of explaining to some of my friends why I was taking an interest in the life of a young Ugandan man. Quickly it became obvious that most of my friends had little interest in blogs, but plenty of Americans were turning attention to Africa often from quite stereotypical frames of reference. As a white middle-aged American the topic of "privilege" come up in many different contexts. It rankles me when it does, but on the other hand turning my attention towards Africa has demonstrated time and time again that there's potency in the construct of privilege.

Offline and online I was being asked about Darfur. In Pittsburgh there are some refugees from the North-South civil war in the Sudan. As I was also trying to find out more about Uganda it was hard for me to discuss Darfur without first making the North-South conflict part of the context. Very often I was sharply criticized for doing so. I'm a fairly incompetent activist in any case so pointing that out comes as no surprise to me. While Darfur was awful by anybody's standards opinions outside Sudan as to what to do sharply differed. Among people I like an admire, my views about US policy towards Sudan were often anathema. Being basically needy, I want very much for people to like me so Darfur was posed something of a dilemma for me.

I read and still read Alex De Waal's blog Making Sense of Sudan. It's really excellent. As far as online discussions about Darfur activism went, De Waal's analysis of the situation was an unpopular. I'm hardly an expert so I didn't spend much time trying to argue from a perspective which was already disparaged. Just in ordinary face to face conversations the sorts of perspectives that The Sudanese Thinker provided were more helpful than the academic perspectives at Making Sense of Sudan.

People wanted to talk about basic information like: Who are the Sudanese in our area? How close is the Sudan to Uganda and what are the relationships? Are Sudan and Somalia the same place? Who are the Somali-Bantu's in our community? The Italians, in Africa, you're kidding me! The tenor of such conversation might seems a little daft. Nobody really likes to be thought of as ignorant, but let's face it I like most Americans are ignorant about Africa. Much of the activism here around Darfur seemed to demand political commitment and such a demand rather pointed up a common ignorance of a large and populous continent.

Here's a post by Drima from early February 2007 entitled Sudan Arab or African? It's the sort of post probably of marginal interest to political scientists and political activists, I guess from an assumption"everybody knows that," but just the sort of post helpful to most of us who didn't know what we were supposed to. I can't remember once Drima writing anything to make it seem that not knowing something was tantamount to being stupid.

I do remember Drima talking about being a college student, hanging out with friends, getting a new CD, eating good food, being exhausted from studying from exams, all of the boring stuff Paul Theroux thinks has no place in literature. Perhaps blogs aren't literature because the boring stuff is important for lots of blogs.

As the events in Egypt unfolded on Twitter, I noted who the Sudanese Thinker was following and often followed those people. People were arrested, people died, sadly Egyptians still are being arrested and are dying. It's hard to have a very detached view of events when following people who know the people arrested and killed, post pictures of them and link to blogs by them.

It's so far fetched to think of Drima, whose real name is Ahmad, as a friend. Ha an Internet-friend, but there's real value in Internet friendships. I was moved when I read the post at his blog giving his name, Amir Ahmad, especially because he connected it to the experience of the the political events in Northern Africa, events which in a way I followed on Twitter along with him and others. I know saying revealing his name comes with some danger attached. I respect that saying his name publicly is to trump fear with love.

Amir Ahmad is writing a book, Islam: A Love Story – How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind, Broke My Heart, and Blogging Freed My Mystic Soul. It's sure to be carefully considered writing,as Theroux maintains literature ought to be. The irony is the book is at least in part about blogs. Ahmad writes:

Set in Sudan, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and the new frontiers of the Arab and American political blogospheres, Islam: A Love Story is ultimately about my journey of spiritual awakening and why and how the internet will not only help reform the political landscape of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also significantly shape the future of Islam as well.

It's sure to be carefully considered writing,as Theroux maintains literature ought to be. The irony is the book is at least in part about blogs. Ahmad writes:

Set in Sudan, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and the new frontiers of the Arab and American political blogospheres, Islam: A Love Story is ultimately about my journey of spiritual awakening and why and how the internet will not only help reform the political landscape of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also significantly shape the future of Islam as well.

I've babbled on about the author Paul Theroux, about the wet spring where I live, about flooding in the American Midwest, about brutishness on Internet forums, and about a blogger named Ahmad, also known as Drima. Is there a thread that connects? I think there is, and imagining a thread is probably why unlike Theroux I rather love blogs instead of loathing them as he does. Love them or hate them, blogs and Internet communications in general are changing how we view and experience the world. Those changes are neither all good, nor all bad.

Toss Pot Wanker

The image is a T-shirt design available at Fuctup, an online retailer in the UK.

On a thread I was participating the other day concerning Obama House Parties, a commentator queried:

just a thought guys... have you ever considered you might all just be a bunch of middle aged old toss pot wankers who just talk a lot about the "issues"...

Okay deliberately didn't post a link, questions like that are ripe for piling on. One of the responses seemed to take offense at the "old" bit. I suspect that's because he'd never heard "toss pot" directed at him. I hadn't either, so consulted the Urban Dictionary an invaluable online reference site. Hum, it seems "toss pot" essentially means "wanker," so added as an intensifier.

I didn't respond to the comment on the thread. If I would, I suppose it would follow along the lines of: "What's wrong with wanking?" Heavens knows I've seen plenty of similar comments more or less directed at me, so it seems worth my while to come up with some sort of come back. I never seem to manage one. Here's my problem: On one horn I am really jazzed about commons-based peer production. On the other horn, I sure do a lot of talking--writing--and other than that it's hard to point to doing much else.

The Urban Dictionary is a good example of what can be done by peer production. It's remarkably complete and accurate all from the distributed gifts of content from many users of the resource. Consider a single entry for the word jagoff. I strongly associate the word with my locale and its charming local dialect. The definitions note the geographic use of the term, but also suggest alternate entomologies and word histories. One of the subtleties of the term's meaning is not just a jerk, but a mean jerk.

When President Bush visited Pittsburgh on Labor Day 2002, I went to greet him. At the time I thought that with enough public outcry, the nation might avoid another Iraq War. One of the signs I took, with wording specially crafted by a friend read:

Hey Bush
We Scoff
Yinza
Jagoff

After a full afternoon behind a tall fence and police cordon, one of those infamous "Free Speech Zones," it became pretty clear from insults hurled from the other side of the fence that my high hope for avoiding war were rather too lofty. And I wonder now just who was the bigger jagoff that day? Yep, I've still got the sign to prove it.

It's too easy to be a mean jerk on the Internet. Lisa Derrick is cool. I mean I really like what she says on her blog most of the time; I don't really know her. Friday night she did a piece about the One Laptop Per Child. She wrote:

They'd like folks to donate to provide kids everywhere with a computer. Which is real nice, except potable water, food and vaccines are a more pressing concern for kids in under-developed and developing nations.

The "real nice" part got under my skin. I've read and written a lot about the One Laptop Per Child effort over the last couple of years. I think it's a project that deserves more careful attention. So I left a comment, and suggested Derrick was self-righteous. I could search the Urban Dictionary for just the right word to fit my asshatiness, but I'll go with jagoff because it's local.

After my impertinent comment at La Figa--Derrick's blog--I headed over to Daisy's Dead Air, one of my favorite reads. Daisy had just posted Part 1 of a two part post Feminists on High Horses. Two problems with the comment I left there: 1) too long and 2) my asshatitude.

There must have been something wrong with me that night. I've done far worse. The remarkable thing about publishing on the Internet is stuff you put up sticks around, maybe forever. If I ever feel too full of myself I know just were to find evidence of me being a jagoff online--sorry no links. In part 2 Daisy picks up on the subject of people being accountable. I'm so math challenged that "accountable" isn't one of my favorite words, but I agree with what she says. When we're out there online, we're accountable in more ways than people of my age, i.e. people who for most of their lives there was no Internet, tend to anticipate.

There's a lot going on in Daisy's post, but there's a part in it I want to bring up. Daisy is working class. When she was younger she was part of "very rigorous political collective." It turned out that the collective was dominated by rich kids. During one of their meetings she asked: "[W]asn't it impossible for rich kids to have the proper class consciousness?" For that she was thrown out. Going out on a limb here, I'll suggest that Daisy feels some resentment about it. She's quite dispassionate in making the point that it's not so strange really that the children of the rulers of the world would presume to be rulers in every setting they find themselves in.

I don't know if Daisy would call it resentment. Over all, especially Part 1 is a bit scathing. But her language about the double bind that the rich kids' presumptions present is quite cool. Because wealth is a factor in the issue which provoked the post in the first place, it seems to me she's tried to lay out this aspect of the discussion in a calm and rational way. But, you know, it feels really bad to be put down like that and the feelings really matter.

I'm a white middle-aged white guy, even if I consider myself poor, I've got privilege that I take for granted. Over the last few years I've tried to collaborate with a couple of friends in Uganda. This is an important part of my life, but a part I find surprisingly hard to tell about.

This afternoon I was chatting with one of my Ugandan friends online. I'd written an email to him, which after I sent it worried some of my privileged presumption was showing. The good thing is we've been corresponding for years, and have developed strong regard for one another, so I didn't worry too much. What he told me in our conversation really moved me, but it's hard to relate because it's got to the feelings part of the double binds created by unconscious privilege.

He talked about how years ago he worked as an organizer in Kenya. He said people really listened to him there. A big part of the willingness to listen to him came from his being from a different place. Then he talked about hearing tributes to Christina Jordan of Life in Africa and that part of that respect came from something like what he'd experienced in Kenya; she wasn't from there. It's hard to relate a conversation, but the meaning I felt from what he wrote was how discouraging it feels when you are poor and put down over an over in little things everyday. My friend is courageous, but told me he felt fear. The fear comes from being told in so many ways you're no good. And his point was how hard it is to organize among people who feel the same way.

I've read lots of what Christina Jordan has put up online over the years, and participated in online social networks she's participated in too. She has been enormously transparent in all she's done. My friend has heard me mention Christina, but doesn't have the same experience of knowing what she's written over time. I hope he comes to see that the Ugandans who are running Life in Africa are confident and competent. Nevertheless, the point my friend was making about the sort of paralysis poverty causes in people is something not lost on those who've worked long and hard with Life in Africa. Getting over the hurdle of people thinking they have nothing to offer is tough.

Sometimes I despair that my online collaboration with my Ugandan friends has yielded not much. I can't dismiss it because, if nothing else, there are genuine bonds of affection. Still there's precious little tangible to show for it.

I turned 53 on the winter solstice. I think Daisy is younger than I am, but I've seen her use the word "old" to describe herself. I prefer the word "experienced." I know Daisy is experienced. Over the past year of reading her posts, I see she's adept at naming her fears and thereby conquering them. I felt my friend was taking a big step in revealing to me the fear he sometimes feels. We all know about fears, it's part of being human. Unfortunately it's probably also a part of being human to exploit the knowledge that we've all got fears. Some people are masters at it and most of us clumsy and unthinking at one time or another.

All of us can create something good. Every one of us has something important to give. What any one of us has may be small, but taken together it's a large amount.

Too many of us live lives in dire need of the essentials. Buckminster Fuller liked to say we live on Spaceship Earth. We've got to find ways for every person here to have enough while recognizing the confines of our little blue planet. Fuller demonstrated doing more with less in so many different ways. Designing ways to create value, to provide us with what we need, by doing more with less is one way. And it's an approach that fits nicely with a confidence in the creative capacity of everyone. But the most popular way of looking at needs in a limited world, one Spaceship Earth, is to imagine that it's fundamentally a problem of distribution. At least here in the USA the plan follows: making yours so the other are left without. There are so many reasons to think that the zero-sums strategy of taking yours before everyone else gets theirs ultimately leaves everyone the loser, but that's a whole other post.

For the purposes of this post I'll just say the zero sum game feels bad. Of course people feel all sorts of ways, so many ways that our feelings often seem unruly. What makes World Wide Web so engaging is we're reading and writing, both consuming content created by others, and making content of our own available. It's pretty hard not to have feelings or not to let our feelings show. A thick skin helps to negotiate around the world, especially around the online world. Ultimately I suspect a compassionate heart is better. Far from getting in our way, feelings can guide the way. It's better if "we give a fig" as Lisa Derrick suggests.

You remember Lisa Derrick? She's the blogger I accused of acting self righteously in re her opinions about One Laptop Per Child. Did you click any of the links to the Urban Dictionary? Maybe you've been there before, or already know our language is rich in words to ridicule. It seems pretty clear the Internet is speeding up the creation of new words to ridicule others. We're making our feelings known online and perhaps that's not so bad. Maybe the engagement with others can help us develop a more evolved emotional intelligence. Maybe we'll learn that our happiness isn't something we can take from others for ourselves, but rather something we can have only by creating it with others.

Memes

Hum I'm not very fond of being tagged in blog tag, but I've got to admit that I do enjoy it when others play. I've been tagged and with great trepidation, I'll play along.

The first is a meme started by Natalia Antonova The 8 Homes Game: Where would you have yours, if you were as insanely rich as the McCains?

The full instructions:

Where Would Your 8 Homes Be?

List them. You don’t have to list your reasons, but if you do at least for a few of them, it would be more fun. And remember that the only rule is: the homes must be within the borders of the United States of America or else, within the borders of the country you live in, so as to utterly emulate the McCains. When you’re done, tag 8 people, so that they may join in the self-indulgence, forgetting about the crappy property market and the equivalent of The End of Pompeii on Wall-Street. You could spend your time hammering your doors and windows shut in preparation for the apocalypse instead, but it would be much less fun.

Egads! Thinking rich isn't so easy. I might say "Screw the rich!" but I've never really had much contact. There might rich people I'd like very much, but maybe not to be screwed by them.

My eight houses:

1. Thistlemoor, New Sewickley Pennsylvania
2. Manufacturing Village, Jinja, Uganda
3. Urban neighborhood, Kampala, Uganda
4. Farm in Deschapelles, Haiti
5. Sustainable resort, Goa, India
6. Resort hostel, Da Lat, Vietnam
7. Small house in Iquitos, Peru
8. Small hotel, Elkins, West Virgina

1. If I were rich one of my homes would surely be where I live now. We call it Thistlemoor and Pingting has a nice set of photos of the place. If I were rich I fix the place up a bit, insulation, windows, porch floors and stuff like that. I would also build a small greenhouse and find some way to use the old silo to good effect. But I love where I live very much.

2. Mostly I'd like places where I'd be welcomed more than anything else. If I were rich I would like to make comfortable places for my friends to live too. LOL many of my friends are online friends.

So I would start in Uganda. My friend Nathan lives near Iganga and the city focus is more towards Jinja. Jinja was once the manufacturing center of Uganda. I think what I would build there would be something that supports mixed housing and light manufacturing.

3. I've got several friends in Kampala. Part of the complexity of urban architecture has to do with the way money flows. Often the way money flows determines what gets built in all sorts of crazy ways. I'm sure I could build a nice house in Kampala. What I would like to build is a nice neighborhood to live. If I were rich I would try to build following along the ideas of Christopher Alexander in his book The Production of Houses. I don't want just a house I want a neighborhood where me and my friends can live.

4. Being rich must be really weird. Here's a story of a local rich man, now deseased:

Larry Mellon, who had left his family home in Pittsburgh as a young man to become a rancher in Arizona, became inspired by a 1947 Life magazine article about Albert Schweitzer and his hospital in Gabon, West Africa. Larry began a correspondence with Dr. Schweitzer, and with his encouragement, attended Tulane Medical School where he studied tropical medicine. While visiting Haiti to complete a malaria research project, Larry and Gwen discovered a setting for what would become their lives’ efforts.

I'd build a small sustaining farm near Deschapelles, Haiti.

5. Sustainable resorts are quite possible, I think. Going on long with my idea of connecting my houses with friends on the Internet a couple of resorts come to mind. The first is Goa, India. I'd like a nice resort village near Goa very much.

6. Another beautiful place on Earth is Da Lat, Vietnam.

7. About a year back I started checking out various social networking sites. At Hi5 I've met some really nice folks from Peru. When I thought of Peru before Hi5 I thought of the Andes Mountains. But many of the folks I've met are from the Peruvian Amazon region. I have a hard time deciding between a house in Pucallpa or Iquitos. I bet I'd choose Iquitos, if for no other reason than it's the largest city anywhere that cannot be reached by road.

8. I was born in Western Virginia. There are very many very sacred locations everywhere. But the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia are especially blessed. Along Otter Creek in the Monogahela National Forest is the most sacred ground I've ever walked. In my mind's eye I see a small cabin in the woods. But I suspect I'd like a little in near Elkins, West Virgina.

The next meme is the Seven Things Meme, seven random facts about myself. The rules:

* Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog.

* Share 6 / 7 facts about yourself on your blog - some random, some weird.

* Tag 6/ 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.

* Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog

1. I don't like blog tag very much! I'm a wimp when it comes to tagging others--hardly have the courage for it.

2. I like to make paper party hats.

3. I like crystallized ginger very much, have since I was a very small lad.

4. I'm wearing my hair in a pony tail nowadays. So far as I know there's not a photo of me showing it yet. It's the longest my hair has ever been. For years I cut my hair myself about four times a year whether it needed it or not.

5. I have it in mind to write a book on gardening called The Incompetent Gardener.

6. Sometimes my temper gets the better of me. The picture is taken from a page at Resiting Women.

In May 2007 in Knoxville (USA), a ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block has disturbed a VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK rally. Maybe the most sublime and funniest, non violent, antiracist and feminist action you have ever read about!

That's how I'd aspire to tame my temper.

7. Of all my crazy ideas one I really would like to put some action to is to organize an I Love You Day Parade. I saw the idea for I Love You Day at the old Omidyar.net site, but haven't been able to locate whose idea it was. Still, it's the greatest idea for a holiday. What better way to celebrate than a parade!

Okay the business part. First the photo and content from Resiting Women is published with a Creative Commons Attribution--Share Alike licence. I tag: Ndelo, Linda, Norbert, Shawn4lia, Grace, Wilfred, and Amanda.

Green Pumpkin Seeds

Avoiding work is the story of my life. I've always got things in mind I want to say on the blog, usually lots of them. So I try to imagine some way to join together all sorts of disjointed thoughts. That's hardly a good plan for blog posts, except of course not finding a unifying theme is as good an excuse as any not to post. Thus I avoid work and effort once again.

An easy theme for today is stuff I like. I've got about a half hour before I've got to make supper so I'll see how much I can cram in. I like tons of stuff.

I like green pumpkin seeds. I got seeds for these pumpkins through my favorite seed catalog J.L. Husdson Seedsman. I don't see Austrian pumpkins listed this year, maybe next. In any case I was anxious to make sure I saved a few seeds for next year. The seeds look so great that I took a picture, but the picture doesn't quite capture what a lovely shade of green they actually are. Unlike other pumpkins the seeds have a soft outer covering so you can eat them out of hand. The oil expressed from green pumpkin seeds is famous as a folklore remedy and there's no doubt its a healthful oil. My friend Nathan in Iganga Uganda and I have talked over the years about seed oil presses after the great organization Kickstart came out with their cooking oil press. I told Nathan I'd made pumpkin soup yesterday and told him about green seeded pumpkins. He says they already grow them in Uganda. I'm happy about that because I like green seeded pumpkins very much.

I like Daisy's Dead Air. Daisy is a great writer and very courageous. There are so many reasons I like reading the blog and lots of the reasons seem convoluted and peculiar to me. When I try to lump them all together into some sort of unifying theme, that Daisy is builds coalitions, or at least see that coalitions might be made, between people you wouldn't on the face expect. She also manages to suggest consilience among ideas that are more usually viewed as apart. I especially like that Daisy leaves comments on my blog.

A couple of comments that she's left recently got me thinking and then avoiding the effort to respond. Here's a comment I liked:

"What's wrong with fairies? I LOVE fairies!"

Yep, I love fairies, and not just the human sort. I find it embarrassing that I've got a category in my mind of fairies, that's related to but not exclusive to the category of mythological beings. I grow Elecampane precisely because it's reputed that fairies live under them. It's probably the case I'd have a heart attack if I were ever to see a fairy, which is strange because my feelings towards fairies is that I like them.

I really like that Daisy read through my meanderings around religion in American politics I wrote recently. Obviously I was searching for something I never have found in those pieces. I'm not a believer in a sort of technical sense in Christian theology. But it's pretty hard to live in the USA and be an American without engaging with Christianity in one way or another. I really like much of my engagement too. Certainly not limited to the business of some of my best friends being Christian either. Daisy is a Christian, a Roman Catholic. Oh, so many things I like. I particularly liked Daisy's comment to this post. What we know simply isn't enough to tell of what we know. I like and agree with her point that reason alone is not enough. I especially like it because I know that reason is extraordinarily important to Daisy. She's got a sharp mind and knows how to use it.

Cripes! I've got to make supper, so I'll come back because I really want to talk about Daisy's most recent comment. Mmm, I like supper.

In my last post I was ruminating on among other things was a quotation, attributed to Hannah Arendt, but also most certainly mis-attributed to her: "Politics is is the application of love for the world." I like that whoever first said it, at least I think I do. I wonder if it matters, as far as liking it who first said it? Let me paste a bit of Daisy's comment, but of course it's worth reading the whole thing:

Feminism reminds us always: the personal is political. Where did these folks LEARN about love? I think Baldwin was speaking as one who was brought up in the Church, as well as an entrenched member of the OLD SCHOOL New York City gay community, which at that time was very protective and took care of each other. On the flip side, we have Hannah Arendt, a brilliant Jewish student, taught about politics by the famous nazi philosopher (Martin Heidegger) who seduced her as a student. Of course she excluded love and hate from everything, or she might lose her mind thinking about WHAT SHE HAD DONE. Better to make it all very high-minded, theoretical and emotionally-removed.

First a couple of links about "the personal is political." The expression is attributed to Carol Hanish and there is a recent new introduction to the 1969 piece as well as the writing itself here. Also Hanish's 1978 songbook Fight On Sisters: and Other Songs for Liberation is online thanks to Duke University Library. From strictly a personal view, the struggle for women's liberation in Gainesville Florida of which Hanish was so influential has touched my life in a positive way. Ah love is strange. And that on a surface level is a point Daisy makes about Arendt.

I easily get bogged down in philosophy. The trouble with philosophers is they all sound so smart when you're reading them. Working out the contradictions and oppositions requires too much work that I'm wont to avoid. Daisy's psychological insight about Hannah Arendt and her affair with Martin Heidegger has a ring of truth to it. I suspect that Arendt's insistence on the separation of the personal and political is a bit more nuanced than that. Certainly Arendt's political theorizing owes much to Heidegger's philosophy.

Among the many scholars and schools of thought which in some ways rest on Heidegger's philosophy Heidegger's Nazism has been a rather essential problem. In my layman's view of it the problem might be phrased: Does Heidegger's philosophy lead to totalitarianism? I'm not the one to attempt to answer that question. But Daisy suggests that Arendt's coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem as a reporter for The New Yorker magazine was perhaps motivated by a desire of Arendt to settle scores with Heidegger. That doesn't really ring true to me.

Perhaps Arendt's two most important books: The Origins Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958) were published prior to her reportage of the Eichmann trial and On Revolution was published in that same year 1961. I'm a guy and therefore probably insensitive about such things by definition, but I really don't get the sense that Arendt was particularly traumatised by having an affair with Heidegger. From what little I know it seems their relationship after the war was collegial, albeit with Arendt's knowledge that Heidegger was an asshole on a number of levels.

There is so much I like. I don't know how to talk about love and yet love seems most important to me. I do say: "I love" but always in saying that I hesitate. I hesitate because while I'm intensely concerned about what I'm loving, my loving seem little in relationship to love. I feel happy when others are loving even when I'm not aware of it, with every expression and experiencing of loving there is more love. I say the more love the better! Love is particular and precise but unbounded. Love is both laughter and tears, so fragile but can change everything. I don't know how to talk about love, and for that reason the confidence with which Arendt says: "In politics, love is a stranger" doesn't really make sense to me.

I like bell hooks.

Human Rights

The Right to Be

May 15th was a day when bloggers around the world wrote about Human Rights. I was going to, but didn't. I got stuck. Here you can find a list of some of the posts. The 27th Comrade who did an excellent round-up of posts in the Ugandan blogosphere.

The real reason for not posting was I got distracted. But thinking about a post was harder than I thought. It's easy when I'm stuck about writing simply for me to ignore the blog. Daisy of Daisy's Dead Air tagged me with a meme and maybe it's just the right prodding to get unstuck and back writing on the blog. While I don't think too highly of any of my posts, I'm extraordinarily fond of the many blogs I read. It seems only fair to participate.

Seven Songs Meme

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring-summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

Oh Happy Day--From Sister Act 2
Shostakovich - Symphony No. 11 `The Year 1905' Mvt.4(2/2)--NHK Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yukio Kitahara.
Lapowny--Geoffrey Oryema
Please Send Me Someone to Love--Jeff Buckley
Harvest For The World--The Isley Brothers
Redemption Song--Bob Marley
All Along the Watchtower--Sungha Jung

I'm all for crediting parents when their children grow up well, but am slow to blame parents when children go awry. There are many influences. I can hardly blame my parents for my many shortcomings. They tried very hard and both gave me so many gifts. Among the gifts I treasure from my mother is her lesson that everyone has a right to be.

Daisy blogs in Greenville, South Carolina. We moved there in the early 1960's and when my younger brother star started primer, my mother began teaching. It was the era of school desegregation, so in a way the dialog about race which Barak Obama speaks about in his speech A More Perfect Union (YouTube video) engaged me early on.

A memory from my mother came to me when thinking about human rights. She taught first grade at John Street School which probably isn't there anymore because it was an old school then. Her first year the school district went to a "freedom of choice" plan. What that meant for the John Street School is it went from being all white to mostly all black in a single year. The memory must be from the second year my mother taught there, and I must have been in sixth grade. Towards the end of the year she organized an excursion for her kids to the city park and I was brought along. Among the treats was a box of cupcakes with bright blue-green icing roughly applied provided by one of the children's mother. I must have looked at them with a scornful look because my mother said to me:

If you so much as say one unkind word about those cupcakes, I'll spank you in front of everybody.

I don't actually remember ever being spanked by my mother. She didn't believe in spanking in school, but certainly didn't believe she should take spanking out of her arsenal at home. Punishments at home were not very ritualized, and I'm grateful about that. In any case I knew my mother well enough to know she didn't make idle threats. And when I remember this, a face of a little girl with corn rows in her hair and missing her two front teeth is grinning widely at me. The feeling I get along with a picture of her in my head is her grin reflected schadenfreude; the teacher's boy got yelled at. It's probably just projection, I doubt my mother said that to me so she could hear. The message was clear: My mother loved every single one of these kids, just as she loved me. Beware hurting anyone my mother loved! And that's why the girl was grinning!

A song popular a year or two latter that always moves me, and I've listened two several times recently is "Oh Happy Day" by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Here's great version from the movie Sister Act 2 that captures something of the awkward joy of cultures interacting. The students and parents of the children she taught brought her great joy. As a child myself the great sin as she showed me was not to take joy, especially for stupid reasons of racism.

Racism is partly what got me stuck trying to write about human rights. Racism can be a personal characteristic, but there are also so many racist structures built into everyday existence. In R. D. Laing's book The politics of Experience, he writes:

It is not enough to destroy one's own and other people's experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.

Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence.

Keguro writes brilliantly and he has helped me to understand better this "wolf in sheep's clothing" quality of American politics--politics including how Americans ordinarily act. Mulling that sent my head spinning. I don't know how to deal with the cruelty my country perpetuates, but surely I can't expect my righteous indignation about other countries will wear well.

Earlier this month I went to the symphony with my father for a performance of Shostakovich - Symphony No. 11 `The Year 1905'. It was a moving performance. That clip is from the 4th movement. The reviewer criticized the balance and the brass as too loud. So you can see that the whole piece is not as quiet as the selection posted. In the quiet parts I thought of Gorecki Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Music is one way to be captured by sorrow and to heal.

I do feel sorrowful often these days, so some of the songs I've been listening to lately reflect that. I loved Geffrey Oryema's Lapowny when I first heard it. This is a great live version. It's worth checking out some of the other videos of Oryema too. From the album notes:

This song is about a school teacher whose body was found lying in a school compound. He was struck by lightening and died on the spot, just as he was getting ready to head home. He had a pile of exercise books which he was supposed to correct at home. As a tribute to their beloved teacher, the pupils composed a song that they entitled Lapwony. It rained heavily on the afternoon Lapwony died. Someone found his farewell letter, the ink all but washed away.

When I'm feeling down the great Percy Mayfield's song Please Send Me Someone to Love comes to mind:

I lay awake night and ponder world troubles.
My answer is always the same.
That unless men put an end to all of this,
Hate will put the world in a flame, (oh) what a shame.

And also this song: The Isley Brothers - Harvest For The World. The keys are, I suppose, love and gratitude. I so often am neglectful.

I am grateful that I got to see Bob Marley perform live here in Pittsburgh. Redemption Song is rather permanently in my head, and I love to hear it in all sorts of cover versions. When I think of human rights, of course I want rights of all to be respected. But rather quickly the problem those that have power over come to the fore. So the question of rights leads to how to do right. Marley's answer always moves and inspires me: "All I ever had are these songs of freedom. Won't you help me sing?"

I can't find a link, I'm almost sure that there is one at Tim Boucher's site, but I can't find it. In any case somewhere I read that when G. I. Gurdjieff was asked what we can do in the face of evil, he replied:

Create something good.

I like that very much.

One of the things I like most about YouTube is seeing people's creations. There is a young South Korean guitar prodigy named Sungha Jung. I love to watch and listen to him play. It's hard to pick a favorite, but his rendition of All Along the Watchtower is surely a favorite.

That's seven songs that have been meaningful to me lately. I won't tag anyone, I hardly know any bloggers well enough. I also know that YouTube is useless where bandwidth is low. But I would love it if others, especially in Africa, take up the meme and let me know you have.

Blog Tag

That's a picture of the City of Pittsburgh Mounted Patrol, or whatever they were. Not sure who took the picture, but it was at the Pittsburgh action against the Iraq War on January 26, 2003. Of course the photo has no relevance to this post. But posting it made me go back to the press reports and there's a picture there with the caption: Veteran peace activist Molly Rush lies in the middle of Fifth Avenue during the "die-in" protest yesterday. I was disappointed not to find a great link to share about the indefatigable Molly Rush, here's a brief one.

The culmination of the march squeezed everyone into a block in front of St. Paul's Cathedral. The horse patrol blocked that egress and the others were blocked by scores of police vehicles. It was a very cold and snowy day. With the initial speeches and the March I was darn cold buy the time we were standing in front of the cathedral. Then Molly Rush and a small group, primarily old women, lay down on the pavement to commence a die in. I didn't wait around but talking to a police officer later she said that the group lasted more than two hours motionless on the ground.

I'm not a fan of blog memes because strangely I can never think of anything to say and am not good at making lists. Daisy of Daisy's Dead Air tagged me with two memes. The first is: five things you regret and five you don't. I'm bad with lists and so will have to pair it down:

I regret my long love affair with tobacco.

I don't regret the cats and my lovely dog, Sheila, sharing their lives with me.

I would probably have ignored the tagging thing, except the other meme was something that I discovered I could do fairly easily. Lady Banana tagged Daisy. Here's the deal:

Rule #1
Copy all the links below and replace a single link under the appropriate alphabet. If your domain name, or even the title of your blog, starts with an ” A,” you’d replace the link under that alphabet and put the replaced link at the bottom. Also, don’t forget to credit the tagger, or where you got the list from, at the end of the list with a full URL of the post so that a pingback gets generated.

A. A Glimpse of the World
B. Bazungu Bucks
C. Composing
D. Dani Rodrik's weblog
E. Eschaton
F. find the time to rhyme
G. Gukira
H. Hats For Health
I. Insight Kenya
J. Jack Saturday
K. Koranteng's Toli
L. Learning Is Change
M. Mentalacrobatics
N. No Longer At Ease
O. Open Office.org Training Tips, and Ideas
P. Paper Forest
Q. 3Quarks Daily
R. Rootless Cosmopolitan
S. Steve Ntwiga Mugiri
T. Transition Culture
U. Uganda's Scarlett Lion
V. Vietnamese God
W. White African
X. Xylophone Building
Y. YouTube
Z. Zone5

Replaced link: Blogging With Cents
Previous tagger: Daisy's Dead Air

Rule #2You now have to “tag” at least five people and encourage them to participate so that this thing spreads like a virus. Remember, though, that not everyone’s into these kinds of things, so don’t be upset if they don’t participate. Just simply replace your tag. Remember to tag blogs only and no pornographic ones as we do want to keep the integrity as a blogging community.

I'm tagging:

Oh heavens! This is the another reason I hate blog memes. I'm not tagging, but I hope anyone who would like to will play the Alphabet Game. It's interesting to see the lists and learn some new blogs.

There's a #3 Rule too, something about asking a question, but you'll have to go visit Lady Banana if you're interested.

Posting Regularly

I sleep in a shack. It can get cold at night, so I sleep under a pile of blankets. That works pretty well, but I can get too hot. Getting too hot is what accounts for remembering a dream the other night. I don't often remember dreams and generally when I do they're no account.

This dream bothered me. I suppose the details really do matter, but the gist of it was that in my dream I extricated myself from a situation where strangers, I was sure, were going to do something really bad to another stranger. I escaped but was left wandering in unfamiliar surroundings.

Yesterday was the Martin Luther King holiday. I read his I Have a Dream once again, and dd posted King's last speech and that speech made me think more about the dream I had. King spoke:

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

He followed with a remarkable telling of the parable of The Good Samaritan. It's really worthwhile to read King's speech. King drew from the parable a lesson:

And so the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

In my dream the first question I asked was: "What will happen to me?" and skedaddled out of harms way. Sensible enough, but I was haunted by the second question and tossed and turned trying to get back to sleep after removing a layer of covers.

Why do we need to question what will happen to that other stranger anyway? Well for one reason King so clearly stated earlier in the same speech:

Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.

It's forty years now and the urgency of that existential terror is even plainer now. Naturally, I care very much about my own existence, but my end is a puny consequence in the bigger view of a our collective doom.

The markets opened today with a pretty clear sense that our financial crisis is a big deal. So there's been plenty of gloomy posts to read in the blogs about that. Stirling Newberry in a comment on his own post today at The Agonist wrote:

Right now the international consensus is that the rich own the world and the rest of us just make trouble.

It's safe to say, seeing how I sleep in a shack, that I'm one of the rest of us. With the memory of King's speech still fresh in mind, something that Bayard Rustin said came to mind with Newberry's comment. Here's Martin Mayer writing about Rustin in The Saturday Evening Post in 1964:

"I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble," Rustin says; and within these categories he specializes in imagination and invention. The man is an artist as well as an organizer—he made his living for some years as a nightclub singer, working with Josh White and Leadbelly at the old Café Society in New York, and he could make a living tomorrow as an interior decorator specializing in antiques. To Rustin, a demonstration is a piece of theater which will be a memorable experience for the spectators (which is what most people are); and it is an opportunity to find a soft spot where concerted action can make a dent in society.

I may not be as creative as Bayard Rustin was, but if I'm trouble anyway, I might as well be creative.

The prodding to post regularly came from leaving a comment at a blog new to me, Daisy's Dead Air. Daisy is fine writer and creative trouble. Trouble making is dangerous, and I'm not brave. Daisy said that I need to post regularly. Although her blog is new, I know she knows we're all in bunch of trouble; I know she knows I know too. So the "need" in this admonition is we better be creative, at least; have you a better idea?

Potash is creative. Leaving his blog posting aside for other projects he's back writing about the current political crisis in Kenya. It's not just at his blog I see him, but in comments at other blogs, encouraging writers towards creative trouble. Not destructive and incitement to destruction, rather to be creative. The writers have written at Kwani?,but the servers are down, so Potash is leaving comments for writers to write and writers are writing.

A long while ago Potash left a comment saying that as a kid he questioned Martin and Malcolm weighing in his mind their approach. The really useful discovery he told me was satyagraha the word that Mohandas Gandhi use for his philosophy of resistance. The word can be rendered in to English as grasping onto truth. Martin Luther King referred to it as "soul force." The application of Gandhi's philosophy on non-violent resistance was in part an American invention with inclusion of Christian theology. But the core of moving away from error with patience and compassion towards truth remained integral.

Opinions vary, naturally, and anything I say about the situation in Kenya as a middle-aged American needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Potash's most recent post is Why I Blame Kibaki. He echo's Stirling Newberry's observation that the powers that be see the rest of us and nothing but trouble. Like Gandhi, King and so many others well understood, Potash avers that the rest of us together cannot be ignored. Together we can create a kind of creative soul force.

Grasping towards the truth requires patience and sadly is dangerous. Not one of us wants to be battered, beaten and burned. We cannot take those dangers lightly. While violence may sometimes offer some protection to us individually, together violence will only perpetuate the human folly that's gotten us into this mess in the first place. We can't dismiss the danger; King clearly knew. Yet in calling us to develop a "dangerous unselfishness" his words are empowering. We've got soul force, bigger than any of us once we turn the question around from "What will happen to me?" to "What will happen to him?" We're in this world of trouble together and it's only grasping that soul force as creatively as we can that will get us trough.